A Withered Branch

I met my twin soul at dawn on a narrow street by the cathedral. The city smelled of wood smoke; clay shingles glistened in the drizzle; medieval walls exuded dampness; and the cathedral bells were booming. I’d just hitchhiked my way into Vilnius. I was alive. I almost cried with joy.

The day before, a Russian trucker had picked me up on an empty highway by a bridge. I liked my driver well enough—he was polite and quiet—but there was another truck following his. At dusk, we suddenly turned off onto a long dirt road that led to a shabby picnic spot on the water. “Time for a breather,” my driver explained. A smallish thug leaped down from the second truck and said hello. They put a pot on a propane stove and produced two vodka bottles and three muddy shot glasses. Then they took bread and sausage in their grubby, dirty-nailed hands and sliced them with jackknives. They each had a jackknife.

A murky foreboding crept into my heart. I proceeded to chat casually, as if everything were as I’d expected: I asked them if they’d ever driven through Moscow and if they had families; I told them about my eight-year-old son (who was at a children’s sanatorium at that moment). I also told them that I was collecting material for a magazine article about hitchhiking. (“That’s right—I’m a professional journalist on an assignment. Here’s my notebook!”) Thank God they didn’t ask to see my accreditation, because I didn’t have any. The real reason I was hitchhiking was that I had neither job nor money.

We ate. They drank all the vodka. I told them I was on the wagon. Then the thug (my driver was peeing behind a tree) asked me whom I was going to sleep with that night. I said, “With Alexei”—my driver—“of course.” The thug didn’t argue: I was Alexei’s passenger. When Alexei came back and we got in the truck, he asked me a question. I told him that I couldn’t, that I was sorry; he didn’t insist—he was tired and drunk. I climbed into the upper berth and covered myself with my sweater. Alexei lay down below. From my position, I could see the thug in his cabin. He kept jerking up his disproportionately small head like an excited worm, checking on us. Darkness wouldn’t come; it continued to be the terrifyingly endless sunset of a Baltic summer night.

At five in the morning, Alexei walked down to the stream. I moved into the passenger seat, afraid to leave the truck, in case they left me there. Alexei came back and began to drive in silence. In the city, I got out, thanked him. Again: it drizzled, the air smelled of smoke, and I walked blissfully through narrow foggy streets, shivering after the warm truck.

Then I ran into her, a modestly dressed woman of about fifty, wearing a kerchief. I asked her, almost without hope, the way a penniless beggar asks where they sell bread, if there was a hotel nearby. She understood immediately and explained, in broken Russian, that the hotels were all full, I wouldn’t find a room, but that I could stay in her home if I wished.

I was stunned. Even among the hospitable Russians, such an offer would be an exception, like that one time in Tula, in the winter, when I asked two little girls if they knew where I could rent a bed for the night, and they took me home, instead, to their grandmother and their father (their mother had just died, right there, in that poor room with a single, feeble light), and one of the girls later shared her sofa bed with me. My heart still aches when I remember that sofa and the children’s simple trust.

It was the same with this Lithuanian woman, who, at that ungodly hour, took me to her tiny, very clean apartment, which was really just part of the attic of a two-story house. The place was barely furnished; she had only necessities, no potted plants, no useless family heirlooms, no framed pictures, nothing. I was served tea with crackers (my hostess kept pushing butter and sugar toward me), and then she gave me a key and dictated her exact address, and I walked out into the city, the beautiful Old Town and its elegant crowd of ladies in little hats.

I dropped in on the editor-in-chief of a major Lithuanian magazine. After a week of travelling—on foot, in trucks, in private cars, on a motorcycle, and even in a wedding van, where I had to listen to Lithuanian singing for two hours and was then asked to perform a Gypsy song—I sat in the comfortable office, among books and typewriters, among colleagues. The editor received me graciously: he expounded at length on the wonders of the Lithuanian language (which, it turned out, was directly related to Sanskrit), knowing all the while that I was there for a reason, and he was right, of course, for I presented him with my manuscripts—in Russian, and completely useless here—which he took politely, making sure that there was a return address on the back. Oh, naïveté! It was 1973, and he didn’t know that at home, in Russia, I had already become a writer non grata—after just two publications, no magazine would touch me, and fifteen years would pass before the release of my first collection of prose. He didn’t know any of this when he took my stories, but three months later I received a wire for thirty-two rubles, a lordly sum for me then, and a letter from him: he informed me, apologetically, that my stories had been published in a women’s magazine, in Lithuanian.

Later that day, I walked around Vilnius in the rain and eventually stepped hesitantly into a café, where ladies in hats and tan gloves sat with miniature cups of coffee, nibbling on little cakes without moving their lips. The waitress loomed over me as I stared at the menu, dreading the prices: I was on a tight budget; I could spend only a ruble a day on food and another ruble on lodging. “Chin up,” I told myself. “You are a Russian writer, don’t forget!”

Back into the chilly rain, in wet shoes, after the clean, warm café. It was evening now—deep-violet skies, shimmering puddles, absurdly lavish shopwindows—and then an instant of panic: how was I going to find that little apartment in a strange city? Somehow, in the gathering dark, I managed to set myself on the right road, and after endless uphill climbing past neat shrubbery and infrequent lights I finally came upon the right house, where the stairs smelled like old timber and dust.

I was greeted with dinner. I blushed: my food ruble had been spent in the café on coffee and cake so I wouldn’t lose face with the waitress, and now I had only enough money to pay for the bed. This I tried to explain, shamefaced, to my hostess, Jadviga, who brushed off my refusals and piled dumplings with sour cream on my plate. Oh, happiness—hot tea! It had taken me two hours, in the cold rain, to find the house again.

After the meal, I answered her questions. Yes, I had passed a number of Lithuanian towns on the way. Panevezys? Yes, I had, as a matter of fact. There was a famous theatre company there, I said. I’d wanted to leave them my play, but the theatre was closed.

“That’s right, the theatre,” Jadviga says. “I’m from Panevezys.”

“No, really? Good for you, such a lovely town, gorgeous parks, flowers in every window . . .”

“Yes, I’m from Panevezys,” she repeats, and continues to move things around on the table like chess figures: sugar, butter, sour cream. “I couldn’t live there anymore, you see, so I came here, bought this place.”

“Good for you,” I repeat mechanically, sensing trouble.

“I had to move, you know. My house burned down.”

Silence. My tongue has frozen.

“I’d left for the market that morning. They all burned to death in their sleep while I was gone. My husband, my daughter, her son, her husband. Since then I cannot cry.”

Silence. Poor light from a single lamp, like at that motherless house in Tula. What is there to say?

Jadviga is visibly displeased with herself: she has revealed her secret too quickly. She should have waited, made small talk first, kept quiet. But how could she? She has been quiet, saying nothing to her new neighbors. They would never accept such tragedy, would shun her the way her old neighbors did in Panevezys.

Every morning, she leaves her new home at six, the same hour at which she had left her beloved family, asleep in their beds, that very last time. She goes where I met her, to the cathedral—where else?

The next day, however, she doesn’t leave so early: I’m still there, with her. She sets the table with coffee, fresh rolls—she must have run out to the store. Her poor little apartment fills with the aromas of wood smoke and coffee.

But I must keep moving. There are still many miles to my final destination, the former house of my favorite author, Thomas Mann, on the Baltic shore in Nida. I must also finish the play I’ve been writing on this trip. I have to hurry; hitchhiking isn’t the fastest way to travel, and I need to be in Moscow at the end of August, to pick up my boy from the sanatorium.

My son has asthma. As for my husband, he died a year ago, in October, at the age of thirty-two; for the last six years of his life, he was paralyzed. By the end he was so emaciated he looked like Jesus.

The tram carries me outside the city, to the highway. Once again I’m hitchhiking by a bridge—I cannot afford the train.

Freedom, a deafening freedom after six years of hospitals. Ten more days of freedom, and after that—everyday life, in which I can hold my child, my savior, my treasure, while Jadviga remains alone in her bare room, a withered branch on a dead tree. ♦

(Translated, from the Russian, by Anna Summers.)

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is the author of more than fifteen books, including “There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In” and a memoir, “A Girl from the Metropol Hotel,” which will be published in the U.S. next year.